Reading groups are formed in response to specific interests of both senior researchers and/or PhD students. It is a flexible, non-fixed structure, focused around a specific subject, an author or a book along the semester. Each reading group meets regularly and organizes their meetings according to the availability of their own members and the number of works to be read.
Reading groups 2025-26
Hegel’s Science of Logic – The Doctrine of Essence (Book Two)
Organized by Silvia Locatelli and Iñigo Baca
The Science of Logic is probably one of the fundamental texts for understanding the Hegelian thought. Indeed, the Logic represents the first sphere of Hegel’s encyclopedic system, and its comprehension is essential to grasp the structure of the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit. After reading the first book in the previous cycle, in this reading group we propose a detailed reading of the second book of the Science of Logic, the Doctrine of Essence.
Attending Love – A Reading Group
Organized by Francesca Scapinello
Love and attention are concepts whose morphology is hard to grasp. They call into play considerations on epistemic virtues, emotions, and interpersonal interactions, and their appeal for philosophical investigations has to do, at least to some extent, with how pervasive they are in ordinary life. If attention has been, and still is, a pivotal notion for phenomenological accounts, love as an object of theoretical interest has somehow been neglected in the history of modern and contemporary philosophy. This reading group aims at exploring what the linkage between love and attention involves, bringing together contributions from authors that explore different facets of this relation. Topics that will lead our reading are: cognitivism/non-cognitivism in epistemology and moral philosophy; the relation between moral psychology and standpoint epistemology; and feminist perspectives on love and perception.
Reading Group on Palestine and Philosophy
Organized by Kaan Gündeş
In the face of the genocide in Gaza, which has been ongoing for over two years, European philosophy has experienced a complete ethical collapse. European philosophy, which had declared that poetry would no longer be possible, not after the Nama and Herero genocides in Namibia, but only after the Holocaust, has not yet reached such poignant conclusions following the events in Gaza. On the contrary, prominent figures in this philosophical community, from Habermas, a contemporary representative of the Frankfurt School of Criticism, to Benhabib, a leading Hegel interpreter, found themselves producing philosophical-ethical arguments in favor of the aggressor and the settler.How did European philosophy, which claimed the right to speak as a global authority on concepts such as reason, freedom, peace, law, equality, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, justice, and so on, suddenly witness its alleged loyalty to these concepts collapse in the face of the reality of Gaza?
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